- Flowers contain sporangia and are the site where gametophytes develop.

- Flowers give rise to fruit and seeds. Many flowers have evolved to be attractive to animals, so as to cause them to be vectors for the transfer of pollen.

Evolution:

- While land plants have existed for about 425 million years, the first ones reproduced by a simple adaptation of their aquatic counterparts: spores. - In the sea, plants—and some animals—can simply scatter out genetic clones of themselves to float away and grow elsewhere. - This is how early plants reproduced. But plants soon evolved methods of protecting these copies to deal with drying out and other abuse which is even more likely on land than in the sea. - The protection became the seed, though it had not yet evolved the flower. - Early seed-bearing plants include the ginkgo and conifers. - The earliest fossil of a flowering plant, Archaefructus liaoningensis, is dated about 125 million years old.
- Several groups of extinct gymnosperms, particularly seed ferns, have been proposed as the ancestors of flowering plants but there is no continuous fossil evidence showing exactly how flowers evolved.
- The apparently sudden appearance of relatively modern flowers in the fossil record posed such a problem for the theory of evolution that it was called an "abominable mystery" by Charles Darwin.
- Recently discovered angiosperm fossils such as Archaefructus, along with further discoveries of fossil gymnosperms, suggest how angiosperm characteristics may have been acquired in a series of steps.

- The general assumption is that the function of flowers, from the start, was to involve animals in the reproduction process.
- Pollen can be scattered without bright colours and obvious shapes, which would therefore be a liability, using the plant's resources, unless they provide some other benefit.
- One proposed reason for the sudden, fully developed appearance of flowers is that they evolved in an isolated setting like an island, or chain of islands, where the plants bearing them were able to develop a highly specialized relationship with some specific animal (a wasp, for example), the way many island species develop today.
- This symbiotic relationship, with a hypothetical wasp bearing pollen from one plant to another much the way fig wasps do today, could have eventually resulted in both the plant(s) and their partners developing a high degree of specialization.
- Island genetics is believed to be a common source of speciation, especially when it comes to radical adaptations which seem to have required inferior transitional forms.
- Note that the wasp example is not incidental; bees, apparently evolved specifically for symbiotic plant relationships, are descended from wasps.
- Likewise, most fruit used in plant reproduction comes from the enlargement of parts of the flower. This fruit is frequently a tool which depends upon animals wishing to eat it, and thus scattering the seeds it contains.

- While there is only hard proof of such flowers existing about 130 million years ago, there is some circumstantial evidence that they did exist up to 250 million years ago.

- A chemical used by plants to defend their flowers, oleanane, has been detected in fossil plants that old, including gigantopterids, which evolved at that time and bear many of the traits of modern, flowering plants, though they are not known to be flowering plants themselves, because only their stems and prickles have been found preserved in detail; one of the earliest examples of petrification.

- The similarity in leaf and stem structure can be very important, because flowers are genetically just an adaptation of normal leaf and stem components on plants, a combination of genes normally responsible for forming new shoots

Symbolism:

Many flowers have important symbolic meanings in Western culture. The practice of assigning meanings to flowers is known as floriography. Some of the more common examples include:
- Red roses are given as a symbol of love, beauty, and passion.- Poppies are a symbol of consolation in time of death. In the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia and - Canada, red poppies are worn to commemorate soldiers who have died in times of war.- Irises/Lily are used in burials as a symbol referring to "resurrection/life". It is also associated with stars (sun) and its petals blooming/shining.- Daisies are a symbol of innocence.

- Flowers within art are also representative of the female genitalia, as seen in the works of artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Imogen Cunningham, Veronica Ruiz de Velasco, and Judy Chicago, and in fact in Asian and western classical art.- Many cultures around the world have a marked tendency to associate flowers with femininity.- The great variety of delicate and beautiful flowers has inspired the works of numerous poets, especially from the 18th-19th century Romantic era.- Famous examples include William Wordsworth's I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud and William Blake's Ah! Sun-Flower.- Because of their varied and colorful appearance, flowers have long been a favorite subject of visual artists as well. - Some of the most celebrated paintings from well-known painters are of flowers, such as Van Gogh's sunflowers series or Monet's water lilies. - Flowers are also dried, freeze dried and pressed in order to create permanent, three-dimensional pieces of flower art.

Usage:In modern times, people have sought ways to cultivate, buy, wear, or otherwise be around flowers and blooming plants, partly because of their agreeable appearance and smell. Around the world, people use flowers for a wide range of events and functions that, cumulatively, encompass one's lifetime:- For new births or Christenings- As a corsage or boutonniere to be worn at social functions or for holidays- As tokens of love or esteem- For wedding flowers for the bridal party, and decorations for the hall- As brightening decorations within the home- As a gift of remembrance for bon voyage parties, welcome home parties, and "thinking of you" gifts- For funeral flowers and expressions of sympathy for the grieving- For worshiping goddesses. in Hindu culture it is very common to bring flowers as a gift to temples.- People therefore grow flowers around their homes, dedicate entire parts of their living space to flower gardens, pick wildflowers, or buy flowers from florists who depend on an entire network of commercial growers and shippers to support their trade.Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_flowers